


All Things Almost Impossible

by Skowronek



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Falling In Love, Friendship, Grand Prix Final, I have a lot of feelings, M/M, Pining, Pining Victor Nikiforov, Protective Yuri Plisetsky, Romance, Vicchan Lives, What-If, or beginnings of it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-10 14:10:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13503174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skowronek/pseuds/Skowronek
Summary: “You,” the boy says. He can’t be older than fifteen, Yuuri thinks, and then it strikes him: he did watch him skate, back when skating was still a thing on his mind, an eternity ago. He watched him skate and he watched him win, and it was just one of the differences between them: Yuri Plisetsky was a gold medallist.Yuuri Katsuki was a failure.___In which Vicchan lives, Yuuri and Yuri become friends at the Sochi Grand Prix Final, and Victor pines a lot.





	All Things Almost Impossible

**Author's Note:**

  * For [voxofthevoid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/voxofthevoid/gifts).



 

 

His [short](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr4j-TQ-f4c) programme is a disaster.

Yuuri knows it even before he leaves the ice. The crowd’s applause rings in his ears, empty, hollow, echoing like a clown’s mockery. It fits, he thinks, after the performance he’s just given – most of his jumps flubbed, and the only one he landed was a pitifully downgraded single Salchow.

He’s had his fair share of awful performances, but nothing beats this – not even the first day he went skating in Detroit, anxious and lonely and so far away from home.

And of course it had to be the Grand Prix Final.

“The free is where it counts,” Celestino tell him once they get out of the Kiss and Cry.

 _It’s bullshit,_ Yuuri wants to say. He clenches his fists until his fingernails dig fearful, reddened half-moons into his palms.Only his respect for Celestino and all the politeness ensured by his Japanese upbringing hold him back from screaming.

The free isn’t where it counts. An animal hospital in Hasetsu is where everything counts, every single breath that Mari sees Vicchan making.

“I’m sorry,” Mari told him on the phone. “I shouldn’t be calling you before you have to skate, Yuuri, but it was a car – I just had to let you know.”

And Yuuri – well, Yuuri hated it, hated that Vicchan was hit by a lorry and had to be rushed to the vet instead of cheerfully playing at home, but he knew where Mari was coming from. He hated knowing, but he’d hate not knowing more, and most of all, he hated leaving Vicchan behind.

“No,” he said. “Thanks, Mari. For telling me.”

Whatever he wanted to add, Mari could guess. The silence between them was too static for comfort.

“You skate your best,” Mari finally told him. “For him. And then you’ll come home, Yuuri. We’ll be waiting.”

Yuuri stepped on the ice, bitter and too raw to skate the programme that was and had always been about his dog. All the while, he wondered whether Mari’s _we_ would include Vicchan or not.

Now Celestino looks as if he wanted to comfort him, but Yuuri will despise himself and his short programme even more for it. He bolts out to the bathroom and ends up locking himself in an empty stall, crunched on the top of the toilet lid and frantically calling Mari.

For a second, Yuuri dares to imagine: unmindful of the hour, on the other side of the world, Mari picks up her phone and tells Yuuri in her usual dry tone that Vicchan’s fine, there’s nothing to worry about, and would Yuuri like to say hi to him? Of course he would, she knows her brother. And then Yuuri’d coo at Vicchan and imagine Vicchan’s tiny paws with all their fluff and pureness, and he’d still be in the sixth after the short but at least he’d be sure: back at home, Vicchan’s safe.

The phone, of course, keeps ringing until Yuuri disconnects with an angry click. He glares at it and then at the stall door, too close to his face, just like the ice was moments ago when Yuuri crashed into it with all the force of his guilt channelled through his triple Axel.

“Oi,” someone says then, “are you gonna sit like this? I don’t have the whole day.”

Yuuri hadn’t even registered that he wasn’t alone. The voice is unfamiliar and harsh, with an accent that makes words rise and fall in unexpected places.

He’s not ready for this. Whoever waits out there, on the other side of Yuuri’s world, could have entered any other stall. They’re all empty. The last thing Yuuri wants is to talk with a confrontational stranger.

Yuuri hates confrontation even more than his own disastrous performance, even more than his failure to return to Hasetsu in the last five years, even more than his inability to compromise with whatever lurks in his head.

He hides the phone in his pocket and stands up, fully aware that the stranger can hear his minute movements. It’s – unbelievable, he thinks, that Vicchan’s there fighting for her life and Yuuri’s miles away scared of a stranger.

He opens the door with more force than he needs and not enough force to let all his desperation out.

And he stops.

Yuuri has never felt smaller than seconds ago in the bathroom stall. It catches him by surprise that he needs to look down to meet the stranger’s eyes. It lasts but a moment – but one moment is enough for the blond-haired boy to step forward, right into Yuuri’s personal space, with no fear at all.

“You,” the boy says. He can’t be older than fifteen, Yuuri thinks, and then it strikes him: he did watch him skate, back when skating was still a thing on his mind, an eternity ago. He watched him skate and he watched him win, and it was just one of the differences between them: Yuri Plisetsky was a gold medallist.

Yuuri Katsuki was a failure.

“You—“ the boy repeats, and it’s odd: his voice breaks and falters before the final sound. “What was that, now? And there on the ice?”

It’s – easier, Yuuri thinks, to confront his own fears in the darkness of his head. Letting them loose in front of Yuri Plisetsky is an entirely different matter – and an infinitely worse one. So,

“Leave me alone,” he says, and then realizes: Yuri Plisetsky might be a gold medallist, but he’s still just a kid with a questionable fashion sense and too many emotions to sort through, and Yuuri should not treat him in such a rude way simply because the kid doesn’t know any better. So, “please”, he adds.

And it’s enough to set Yuri Plisetsky off.

“Please?” he repeats, incredulous. His voice breaks in the middle, a tiny hitch that reminds Yuuri just how young the kid is, and how talented regardless of his age, and how unreal it is to have a conversation with him in a men’s bathroom. “Please? You – you didn’t have the guts out there to give us the clean skate we deserved, and now you’re saying _please_ to me? Only you, Katsuki. Only you would have the nerve to say it to my face but not there, where it counted.”

Yuuri understands nothing of it. It’s not that Plisetsky’s English is not clean, even though his intonation colours it different shades than Yuuri himself is used to.

He’s not quite sure what Plisetsky means by all of it; he’s also quite sure he knows where the kid is wrong.

“It didn’t count,” he says then, and immediately spots his mistake. It did count, and now he knows: this, too, is why Yuuri is hurting. He doesn’t want to lie to Plisetsky, but he’s also as bad with words as he is with his quads, and when he tries to explain, it comes across as shaky, interrupted. “You know – it didn’t, but it didn’t, only there are things that count _more_ and I ---”

“And you”, Plisetsky interrupts, “are an idiot. Nothing counts more than skating.”

Yuuri feels all the air in his lungs leave him.

“My dog is fighting for her life,” he says.

Suddenly, silence stretches into one of those moments where the time works differently: it pivots on Yuuri’s words and draws lines into the future, sharp like those that Yuuri’s skates always leave on the ice. Plisetsky opens his mouth and says nothing; Yuuri realizes that the kid, too, may not be that good with his words; the only language they really have in common is skating.

“You should show them,” Plisetsky then says, his voice too loud, “you should show them it’s not like this.”

Yuuri understands all the words separately but can’t make any sense of them. It’s just as well. He can’t comprehend this entire situation – it’s like he spectates in it but it happens to someone else, to a different Yuuri, one step removed. That he doesn’t understand Plisetsky now seems only fitting.

“What do you mean?” he ends up asking.

Plisetsky shoots him a look that is not difficult to interpret: something between rage mixed with disbelief and almost sprinkled with pity.

“Honestly,” he says. “You – you don’t suck, okay? Don’t be an idiot, Katsuki. You – well, _I –_ know that you don’t suck. Now you just need to show them.”

Plisetsky looks at him as if that was the easiest, most obvious thing in the world. As if Vicchan wasn’t out there, with Mari by his side, Mari who would count her shallow breaths under the white glare of the hospital’s lights.

Yuuri can’t help it, he laughs.

“You – don’t mock me!” Plisetsky all but shouts, appalled, his toes digging into the bathroom tiles as if he were still on the ice in his skates, ready to launch himself up into the air just to avoid being in the close proximity to Yuuri.

“Show what who?”, Yuuri asks. Or should it be: show who what? Words don’t seem to make sense today. Yuuri’s not having it. “Why are you even telling me all of that?”

Plisetsky stares at him, hard, with a force no fifteen-years-old should be capable of.

“You’re one of the few out there who don’t suck,” he finally says. “But all of them – the judges, they all think you do. And that’s just not fair, okay?”

Plisetsky is wrong. Yuuri’s not gonna tell him that. Something in the defiant way the kid points his chin at Yuuri suggests that he wouldn’t listen, anyway.

“You can’t be serious,” he just says. There’s no way he’s going to drop the weight of all his problems on Plisetsky’s chest. There’s no way he can tell him about all his failures, all the times he was sure Ciao Ciao would tell him to pack his things and go back to the sleepy hell of Hasetsu.

Plisetsky snorts, an ugly sound that ricochets off the bathroom tiles.

“Share my ice time with me,” he suggests. “My coach won’t mind. You’re good at figures”, his mouth twists into a smirk, “and apparently I’m not.”

Before Yuuri’s brain processes the fact that apparently both Plisetsky and Yakov Feltsman consider his figures adequate, the kid is long gone.

It’s horrible, he thinks, but he’s too confused to drown in guilt.

 

___

 

Morning comes bright and too easy. Yuuri wakes up in such a sour mood that s glimpse of the beautiful day outside his hotel room annoys him more than he can tell. There’s still no word from Mari; he calls her, but she doesn’t pick up.

The only new text on his phone is from Yuri Plisetsky.

Yuuri has no idea how the kid got his number. He’d suspect Phichit  - only that Phichit would call him to ask about it and offer the shallow comfort of idle chatter.

He plods to the bathroom and then to the rink, grabbing a smoothie on the way and trying not to think about the way Yuri Plisetsky cut the ice with his skates as if it were the easiest thing in the world, as if he belonged there; while Yuuri himself only met it face-down, painfully, a slap from reality.

Why would he even meet Plisetsky now, Yuuri has no idea, but when he steps onto the ice, the kid is already there, waiting impatiently, a scowl on his face. He looks oddly miserable. Yuuri didn’t expect it and it throws him off balance as if he only put his skates now for the first time.

“I didn’t think you’d come,” he says. “You didn’t text me back.”

Yuuri rarely does. His friends know it; his fingers will hover above the keyboard and he’ll think about a reply but rarely send it. Navigating through the social etiquette of the Internet is even worse than in real life, so many different kinds of texters, so many weird online dialects he has no hope of understanding, and he feels more lost out there than he ever had back when he first set his foot in Detroit.

But, well, Yuri Plisetsky isn’t his friend. He wouldn’t know.

“I’m sorry,” he says, truthfully. The kid might be abrasive and rude, but he did reach out to Yuuri in his own way, and he did not deserve the whole package: Yuuri’s anxiety, Yuuri’s self-doubt, Yuuri’s everything.

“Never mind,” the kid grumbles. Yuuri, who expected either hissing or shouting, barely gets the hang of his surprise when Yuri glides towards him and sends him a glare that almost makes Yuuri flee there and then. “Show me that quad Sal.”

 

___

 

“No, no, no,” Yuuri waves his hand watching as Yurio goes smoothly through his step sequence. It’s a risky one: confident, challenging, and utterly robotic. “Like this.”

He moves to imitate Yuri, trying to recall his exact position and the exact moment it went wrong, the tilt of his hips slightly different, the wave of his hand a bit altered. It’s rugged, unfinished, some parts of Yuri’s routine so fresh in his mind and some so unfamiliar, and so he plunges into the new rhythm with the confidence he doesn’t feel. Where his muscle memory can’t take him, Yuuri improvises the rest with the same restless energy that always brings him onto the ice in the limbo hours when he skates his thoughts away.

It’s so imperfect and unfinished, and he’s a bit ashamed that this – this is what he’s showing Yuri. But Yuri did ask, in his own cutting way.

“So,” he says when he ends it all with an Ina Bauer and marks the jump, “something like that.”

One look at Yuri makes him falter; the kid wears his arms crossed and one of his toe picks bites the ice. The tilt of his head is oddly still, like a cat’s.

That bad, was it?

“Those bastards,” Yuri says. “They underscore you every single time. That was...”

“Amazing.”

Yuuri turns so quickly that he could as well move into a spin. He knows this voice, he’s heard it in interviews. He’s heard it in his dreams.

He was going to tell Yuri that no, he’s never underscored, what is he even talking about, but all the words die on his tongue.

Victor Nikiforov steps on the ice with an ease that Yuuri would expect of him. Only it’s different now. His silver hair is still there. His eyes are as bright as ever, or maybe even brighter; Yuuri can hardly judge from the distance, and it might be a trick of the lighting anyway. But he looks – softer, somehow, although his back is still straight and his skin looks so soft that Yuuri thinks it must be pure silk.

And then, just as Nikiforov skates closer, it hits Yuuri: this Nikiforov is not pretending.

Yuuri realizes it just as the man gives them a private, delighted smile, a bit shyer than the one Yuuri had seen him send at dogs.

Perhaps this smile is the reason Yuuri does not sink into the cold well of anxiety. Instead, he finds himself frozen in space, as if the ice rose from the surface of the rink and travelled up and into his chest. His sharp, audible intake of breath makes Yuuri go still and somehow – inevitably – he can’t breathe.

Before he forces his body to relax, Yuuri exists as if he just dropped by, a man from nowhere, a man without a past, an observer. Victor Nikiforov’s smile tells him more than any interviews with the man did in the past.

It tells him a story.

The Victor Nikiforov who glides towards Yuuri is not the same Victor Nikiforov who gazed at him from the sun-bleached posters in Hasetsu. This Victor Nikiforov makes a minute gesture with his fingers that Yuuri might interpret as hesitant. Yuuri would know – doubting is a kind of his thing. This Victor Nikiforov is an incomplete puzzle that Yuuri doesn’t know even though, perhaps, he already sees all the scattered pieces. This Victor – and Yuuri can see it as clear as a day now – has a tiny collection of freckles on his nose like kisses from the stars.

No, Yuuri doesn’t panic. He melts.

Because it takes him seven seconds of the freckles-sprinkled, jiggle-shaken silence that follows Nikiforov’s single, impossible _amazing_ to realize that this Victor Nikiforov is real in a way no poster can ever be. Where he used to be an unreachable, untouchable idea personified and deified with all that it entailed – the talent, the smirk, the hair – now, it was a different Victor Nikiforov.

It was strange. But Yuuri could easily imagine him doing everyday things, leading an everyday life. Waiting for his coffee in a queue, watering a dying plant in his flat, writing a New Year resolution in his journal and then forgetting about it like millions of other absent-minded people on the planet. Wiggling his toes only to realize there’s a gaping hole in his sock.

Yuuri almost allows himself a smirk at the last one. Almost – it’s a good feeling to have, if _almost_ can be a feeling. He’s almost amused, almost terrified, and almost – almost glad. If there is one thing Yuuri feels safe in, if there’s one thing Yuuri is sure about, it’s the unrelenting rhythm of falling and getting up, of failing and trying, of navigating the lull of dull everydayness without neither a compass nor a guiding hand. To realize that Victor Nikiforov is, despite all things, as human as Yuuri, and perhaps even more – perhaps even unused to this never-ending cluelessness – it suddenly lets Yuuri breathe more freely.

It all lasts but seven seconds. Yuuri thinks – maybe he should say something, speak. He doesn’t dare.

“That was,” Nikiforov says, “amazing.”

“What are you doing here?” Yuri barges in, “it’s my ice time. Are you so senile you forgot what time is yours?”

Perhaps Yuuri should be surprised at this sudden outburst, only just moments ago Yuri criticized his skating, his step sequences, his fashion choices and his Instagram presence, all in one breath, all before demanding Yuuri teaches him the same step sequence he claimed to hate so much. So instead, he takes half a step back and observes.

“Yura, Yura, “Nikiforov laughs. “Your step sequences need more work. Yakov sent me to help you.”

He’s like a forest creature, Yuuri thinks, beautiful, and kind, but cruel. He knows, despite spending less than a few hours with Yuri, that it’s a wrong thing to say.

“I don’t need help!” Yuri Plisetsky claims. “Fuck off. Go bother Mila, or Yakov, leave me alone. I have it covered.”

It must be painful, Yuuri thinks, to train in the shadow of Victor Nikiforov; to be a great skater who can grow and learn but will never outshine the burning star, not until Nikiforov decides to step down, and perhaps not even then. Yuri seems to be aware of that and confronts it in the same raw, unpolished way that only adolescents can. But Yuuri wonders whether Nikiforov knows it, too, or whether he remains as unreachable as a rink mate as his posters are.

“I see,” Nikiforov says, and there is it: a familiar gesture, a finger brought to his mouth.

Yuuri was so sure about his earlier epiphany – so sure that this was the true Victor Nikiforov. But perhaps he is wrong. Perhaps this Victor, too, is playing a role, putting on a mask as if his entire life was as extravagant and mysterious as the Carnival of Venice. Or perhaps – he puts himself out there, a part of Victor in every poster, every magazine spread, on the ice, until he thins and thins and there’s not enough Victor left to fill in those everyday moments.

“I can see you have it covered, Yura,” Victor then says, and Yuuri, still silent and still confused, is overcome by a sense of wonder when it’s him that Victor locks his eyes with, not Yuri.

“Don’t you have anything else to do,” grumbles the kid then. Yuuri, privately, wonders about the same. He still hasn’t said anything, though.

The more human Victor becomes in his eyes, the less human Yuuri gets in his. He’s almost floating – almost, because balancing on two thin sharp blades is all that gets him from flying away, weightless. This meeting – this whole day – this entire Grand Prix Final – does not agree with the life Yuuri is used to.

And now, Victor Nikiforov glides closer, closer than he’s ever been, him and his freckles and his silver hair and all of his things that Yuuri doesn’t know.

“Yura’s right,” he says. It comes out half as a chuckle, half as a – snort? Yuuri is not sure. “He doesn’t need me. Your step sequences are better than mine have ever been.”

 

___

 

It doesn’t happen in Yuuri’s dream, but it well could.

The next hour is all about the glide of their skates on the ice, Victor’s presence impossibly close, Yura’s glare impossibly cold. Yuuri tumbles and fumbles and skates his anguish away, and checks his phone for updates from Mari. It’s surreal, and a little bit otherworldly.

And Yuuri, completely baffled by Victor Nikiforov’s surprisingly shy gestures and oddly wide smiles, almost forgets that Vicchan is fighting for her life.

Almost, because once fear takes a grab on his heart, it cannot leave. Almost, because although Yuuri slowly realizes that this, next to him, is really the true Victor Nikiforov, he can’t imagine why the man would want to spend time with him, skate with him, next to him, and watch Yuuri fall.

“You move like you hear sadness,” Nikiforov tells him.

What Yuuri doesn’t say: he moves like he can do after all those long hours of trepidation, of fear and guilt and memories full of Vicchan. He knows what he moves like: his gestures jerky, interrupted, his glides as inelegant as they can be. Victor’s presence doesn’t help – Yuuri feels as if he had just stepped on the ice for the first time in his life.

No wonder – everything in Yuuri’s life is so out of balance that he can’t help but anticipate all his falls and meet them crashing hard, without cushions.

Nikiforov insists Yuuri goes through Yuri’s step sequence, and watches them with the kind of an expression on his face that Yuuri can’t read, as if it was written in an untranslatable language. He watches Yuuri run through his free too.

Yuuri marks all his jumps and pours all his pain into the step sequence, his music a bitter, unnecessary reminder of the last few days. He chose the music thinking of Vicchan, her tiny paws and wiggling joy; he skates it thinking of her pain. It’s so unfair, he thinks, moving into his camel spin, so unfair and so harsh. And when Victor Nikiforov tells him it was _beautiful_ and looks at him as if he’s something fragile and precious, as if Yuuri has just sketched a Botticelli painting on the ice, he doesn’t know whether to turn away or break down on the spot.

He does neither.

“Thank you,” he says, because if Victor Nikiforov has always been gracious to his fans, then his fan can be gracious back to him. It sounds stilted, like everything Yuuri does or says, and yet Victor brightens, impossibly, like when you pull the curtains back into the sunlight.

It’s all so unreal that he just accepts it; he’s too tired to wonder.

 _how are u?_ reads a message from Phichit that he checks during his water break, and Yuuri, wordless, sends an awkward selfie instead of trying to come up with a reply.

“A photo!” Nikiforov shouts then. He skates over to Yuuri, something in his expression unguarded and hopeful, and “We need a commemorative photo”, he declares.

Yuuri moves because he’s been moving his body for just over twenty years and it seems to have acquired some kind-of working muscle memory. They take selfies, one with Yuuri’s phone that he’s instructed to post on Instagram, and then a series of pictures that Victor snaps with the same ease that Yuuri has seen in Phichit. Yuri Plisetsky refuses to appear in the same picture with Victor, but he does – reluctantly – pose for one with Yuuri, the tips of his ears slightly red.

“I hate you,” he declares towards Victor, who laughs airily as if it were a great joke.

By the lockers, Yuuri tries to get hold of himself, to catch the wisps of those unbelievably stretched hours and wrap them around himself like a blanket. He’s unfocused, the music of his free still ringing in his ears, Victor’s shy smile under his eyelids, Mari’s frantic call from the vet in his memory. Yuri and Victor argue in Russian on the other side of the locker room, but when Yuuri approaches them, hesitantly, Yuri shoots him a look and immediately switches to his accented, raging English.

“You – you don’t get to spend time with him! You’ll corrupt him!”

“Yura,” comes Victor’s easy reply, “are you...”

“Shut up! He’s – he’s a cat person!”

Victor’s laugh reaches Yuuri’s ears before he can understand what it means.

“Yura, his free skate is about his dog.”

“That’s – that’s a metaphor!”

Yuuri doesn’t know how to react; he gets it, all the words separately, but somehow it goes beyond silly banter. It’s almost as if he can swim with its underlying current, only he doesn’t, not really.

“Yura, Yura,” Victor then says and he's all smirks, “you use big words for someone so small.”

Yuuri quietly marvels how he gets to see Victor Nikiforov like this, all hesitant gestures around Yuuri and this easy teasing around Yuri Plisetsky, two faces of the same complicated man.

“Just – shut up, old man. I’m gonna – I’m gonna _decimate_ you next season, just you wait—“

Yuuri tilts his head, wondering whether decimation could actually be applied to a single person. But then Yuri finally addresses him, his voice half a tone quieter now.

“And you – we’re gonna leave the old man to count his grey hairs now. And you’ll tell me why your short sucked so much, in detail. But first we grab some food.”

They pass Victor, shaken, starry-eyed.  And then Yuuri is dragged towards a food truck he should, with no doubt, avoid with all his might, Yuri Plisetsky’s hand grabbing his arm, but before they manage to leave the rink, Victor’s voice stops them.

“Yuuri?”, he says. “Tomorrow, before the free. Would you like to have breakfast with me?”

 _Yes,_ Yuuri almost replies. He thinks it, as hard as he can, the kind of magical thinking that ends up cursed far too often. Victor’s face is strangely open in the cold Sochi air, open and vulnerable like no poster, like no magazine spread. Suddenly, Yuuri wants to come closer and kiss all of Victor’s pale freckles.

He doesn’t.

“No,” is what he says instead. “I can’t. Not now. I’m sorry.”

 

___

 

He’s sorry later, in his hotel room, where he FaceTimes Phichit and they go over the complete list of all impossible things that have happened since Yuuri left their Detroit dorm, dragging his suitcase with him like a death sentence. He’s sorry later, during his ice time, when Celestino desperately tries to get him back into the right headspace and of course fails.

“Don’t worry,” Yuuri tells him and is shocked that he does. “I’m so rarely in the right headspace that it shouldn’t matter anymore.”

And perhaps it doesn’t. Not the way Vicchan does, poor Vicchan and her tiny paws and the way Yuuri left her all those years ago to follow dreams that were great and impossible, but also ice-cold and lonely.  Not the way Victor does, this new Victor that invites Yuuri out and watches his step sequences, and bickers with Yuri Plisetsky and is unafraid of his fifteen-years-old wrath and aeons-old fury.

“It matters what you feel, Yuuri,” Celestino tells him as, but he refers to skating, not to the things which really won’t leave Yuuri’s heart and mind now. “Focus on the free now and we’ll figure things out from there.”

And Yuuri’s too polite to laugh at that, too scared and too respectful, but he doesn’t know how Celestino could figure out what Victor Nikiforov wants from him, or what Yuri Plisetsky wants from him, or how Yuuri can go back in time and wrap Vicchan in blankets and either bring her to Detroit or never leave Hasetsu.

Something must show in his expression because Celestino just sighs. Anyone else might try to hug Yuuri, but Celestino knows him well enough to realize it brings him the opposite of comfort.

“What can I do to help, Yuuri?” Celestino finally asks. “Anything?”

 _Make Vicchan safe,_ Yuuri almost says. _Tell me why Victor Nikiforov looks at me like he has never looked at anyone in any of the YouTube videos._

“Can you wait here?” he asks instead. “I’d like to make a phone call.”

 

___

 

“There’s no improvement,“ Mari tells him. Yuuri prepares himself for the way the leaden weight of her words will sink into his bones. It will make him heavy, graceless. “I’ll call you when I know something, alright?”

“Are you with her now?”

“No, but dad is. I’m at home – I needed to help mum.”

It’s strange, Yuuri thinks, to be reminded how the world keeps going even though Vicchan is held back. His own world has been running so fast that Yuuri can’t catch his breath and a part of him is left behind on the same plane that Vicchan’s stuck on.

“Hi,” he breathes into the speaker moments later, once Mari passed the phone to their mother. “Mum?”

She’s always so happy to talk to him, to spread her easy, comforting charm until it reaches him in whatever foreign country he is at the moment. It’s not different now. Hiroko must be tired, Yuuri knows, because she often is tired even if she conceals it, and she must be worried, too, because she loves Vicchan fiercely and because she has never been good at hiding her worries.

“Sweetheart,” she says, and Yuuri feels a tiny bit lighter. “We’re with you all the way, you know that, right?”

Yuuri marvels at the way she always knows what to tell him – how she doesn’t coat her words in layers of sugar that will melt to unravel the sharp ugly truth. She doesn’t tell him what she wants to hope but can’t be sure of, none of _it’s gonna be fine_ ’s and _Vicchan will live_ ’s. He almost breaks down there. His breath almost turns into a sob, but his mother keeps talking, talking, until Yuuri feels certain that while it is not okay and it may not be, they will face everything together.

 

___

 

[When](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu9vBeiW3s4) he steps on the ice and then, seconds later, when he waits for his cue, and then, seconds later, when he beings to move, Yuuri knows: they’re with him now, his parents, and Mari, and Vicchan. He sends his thoughts and his soul all the way to Japan, lets the song carry his heartbreak.

He skates it all – and this time, it’s not like in the past, he doesn’t skate anything away. He weaves it into the fabric of the ice with his every spin, with his every turn, until the whole ice is his, unique like a snowflake.

He touches down on his quad Salchow, and it makes him cringe, but he pours all his longing into it until the mistake becomes a part of this letter home, too. He skates and skates and skates until his confusion is written on the ice, until his toe picks leave spots on the surface like Victor’s tiny freckles, like a memory he can’t shake.

The song finishes, the final notes fade away. And Yuuri feels that it’s not over yet. He reaches his hand towards the sky, towards Japan, towards Vicchan, and for once, his score does not matter. He’s not Katsuki Yuuri, Japan’s Ace – he’s just Vicchan’s Yuuri, and once the competition is over, he’s going home.

 

___

 

“Congratulations,” Celestino tells him, moments later, when his scores are announced and when Yuuri realizes that he doesn’t care as much as he should. Or maybe he shouldn’t care at all.

His scores are high, improbably high, Yuuri’s personal best, and Celestino keeps talking. It’s probably enough for him to medal – Yuuri’s too disinterested to calculate this, it’s too much mental effort and not enough purpose.

He leaves the Kiss and Cry dazed, Celestino trailing behind him, and all he can think of is: now I can get home.

 

___

 

“Oi!” shouts Yuri at him as he’s leaving to call Mari, “you – you didn’t suck this time.”

It’s probably as close to a compliment as the kid can get. Yuuri takes his words for what they are and gives him a smile that might be a bit too sharp around the corners of his mouth. Plisetsky doesn’t reply to that. Plisetsky hovers around Nikiforov, who gives him a wide-eyed, startled look, and Yuuri thinks maybe he should stay and watch him. Two days ago, he would have, he would drop everything – but not now.

 

___

 

He hovers by the lockers, reaching for his phone to dial Mari’s number, but she calls him first. Yuuri’s thumb tumbles when he answers the call. He sits down on a bench, awkward, and greets Mari exactly the moment she says hi to him.

There’s a beat of silence, and then they giggle, together.

“I miss you, you dork,” Mari tells him, lightly, all the way from Japan. Something clenches in Yuuri’s chest. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t watch you, how did it go?”

“Fine,” Yuuri says. “It was fine, but how is Vicchan?”

Mari falls silent for a second. Yuuri doesn’t dare hope – hope is not for silly boys who left their dogs behind. Yuuri doesn’t deserve hope and neither does he deserve absolution. But Mari’s voice was oh-so-cheery when she answered the phone, and Yuuri doesn’t dare hope, but he _wonders._

“She’s gonna be fine,” Mari tells him, breathless, and just as Yuuri didn’t want to their mother to blanket him with false promises before, now he needs to hear it again and again. “The worse is over. She’s gonna be alright.”

Yuuri lets out a sound, almost a sob, but not really.

“Mari,” he says, “I’m going home.”

 

___

 

Later, when he stands on the podium, his bronze medal around his neck, Victor Nikiforov next to him, higher, still higher and Yuuri will have to reach and reach but he’s so close now – later, he will grin and cry and he won’t know it’s because Vicchan is alive or because he’s medalled, or maybe both, or nothing.

“Oh, Yuuri?” Victor asks him with the same shy, freckled smile on his face, “Congratulations! I watched you. You were stunning. Breathtaking.”

It hits Yuuri now: Victor asked him out and Yuuri refused, like a moron, and Phichit would laugh himself silly if he ever heard about it. It hits him: they’re out in the public, as public as they can get, and camera flashes explode around them like fireworks, but Victor wears the same soft, private smile that he did at the rink earlier, when he didn’t have to pretend. It hits Yuuri now: he almost missed all of it, and now that he didn’t, it still feels almost impossible.

So he smiles, awkward because that’s how Yuuri smiles, he doesn’t know how to pretend. Vicchan’s gonna live, and he won a medal, and he’s going home.

He might go on a date first.

“Victor,” he says. “I know I said no to breakfast before, but it wasn’t the right time, and... I think it would be nice? Or maybe, if not breakfast – how are you feeling about a cup of coffee?”

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm fairly sure Yuuri's music is not the right length for his programmes but shhhhh it's nice and it's from a film about a dog and that's more important
> 
>  
> 
> I waste my life on [tumblr](http://kaja-skowronek.tumblr.com) if you wanna and say hi!


End file.
